Magento database maintenance

If you have a sluggish Magento store, generally the advice is to implement caching, minimise file sizes, concatenate CSS and Javascript, use a CDN, and optimise server settings. Whilst good advice, it misses a key part of the jigsaw when it comes to website speed – your database.

Magento, like most modern websites, stores its information in a database. PHP is used to extract it and turn it into HTML, which your web browser then renders.

The larger your database is, the harder your server has to work searching through more records to find the correct information it needs in order to display a page to your web site user

The guide below details how you can perform Magento database maintenance using Magento’s admin panel or phpMyadmin

As always, make sure you backup your database before making any changes.

Did you know…

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Clean your Magento database using the Magento admin panel

1

Log into the Magento admin panel

Log into your admin panel by visiting the admin URL

This is by default www.yourdomain.com/index.php/admin unless you specified otherwise when installing Magento

2

Navigate to System > Configuration

3

On the left hand menu, navigate to Advanced > System

4

Choose “Yes” in the “Enable Log Cleaning” dropdown box.

Complete the rest of the settings as you see fit. Here I’ve set log files to be deleted after 30 days and for the database clean to be run daily at 01:00

Clean your Magento database using cPanel and phpMyAdmin

1

Login to your cPanel account

Navigate to your login page for cPanel. This is normally your domain name or IP address followed by /cpanel

e.g. http://yourdomainname.com/cpanel

2

Click the phpMyAdmin link in the database section

3

In the top left area of the page, click on the relevant database

4

On the right hand window, search for the following and tick the box next to the table name: